Читать книгу The Stone Field - Martha Ostenso - Страница 4

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After the night of rain, a smallish, wan sun was struggling through wool tatters of cloud. Jo wondered if it would be possible now to see the Stately Mansion if she climbed to the top of the big pine on the ridge back of the barn. She had not been up there since one glittering late afternoon in February when the windows of the Stately Mansion had reflected the setting sun in a trance of wild, pure fire.

She gave a careless glance back at the house, then made her way to the rear of the barn and up the hill. Her mother had lately objected that she was becoming too big a girl to climb trees, and anyhow because the Hartley women were delicately formed she might suffer a strain. But Jo Porte did not think of herself as a Hartley woman.

The first big limb of the Norway was still there, although her mother had ordered Ned Larkin, the hired man, to lop it off so that Jo might more easily remember that she was not a boy. Jo swung herself rapidly aloft, the great round shags of needles shaking drops down upon her as she climbed. Every year it was becoming more perilous, this airy island above the forest sea, and today prudence checked her before she was more than halfway to the top. She crouched disconsolately down on a stout branch and clung to the rough, rosily patterned bark. Even here she could look out over the land. The moan of the huge pine which came, she had long been certain, not from the wind in its branches but from its true, sturdy heart, was too familiar to her to be any distraction.

All the world known to her in any deep measure—the town was not yet of it—lay spread out below, beyond the casement made by the branches of the tree. Now, before the leaves came to the hardwoods, the cabins and huddled barns of the settlers all along the lake shore were visible, from beyond Spite Island and the scurfy ice plain on the east to the steel-blue rim of open water on the north circle. The Vandermeyers’, Toufangs’, Torkelsons’, were there, and farther back in the sooty spring brushwood, unseen but known, were the farmsteads of the Dibneys and the Matthewses. And yonder, in the fold of a dark ravine, hidden from view, stood the awesome stone house of old man Baggott, who kept his fierce pack of black dogs chained except on certain nights when his mischievous fancy chose to let them roam the countryside. Southwest, the world slipped into the Owl Country, a junglelike region of pine and hardwood and swamp underbrush not to be thought of by most people, especially at night, except with fear. But the headland south and east, level now with her sight across the cove and through the torn and lightened space of air, rose prideful and aloof from all else that had been tracked down through her childhood and made common.

Jo’s gaze fixed itself upon that headland and the great house that stood up to view there among the trees. It was only in the spring last gone that she had come to know, from The Chambered Nautilus, the true name of the Hilyard house. Her discovery had gone out on wings, across the lake, to alight unknown upon that towerlike gable that thrust itself upward from the corner nearest the lake. Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul! With no other had she shared the luminous secret.

The sun emerged, an uneasy, watery disk, and feebly irradiated the green roof of the Stately Mansion. It was something to be able to see it at all. The Lombardy poplars which rose high about it would in a few weeks be a tableau of pale green torches against the sky. Now they were merely phantom etchings in rain gone over. The windmill, the silo, the enormous gambrel-roofed barn and the other structures on Sky Valley Farm Jo always preferred to ignore. What did it matter if their like was to be found nowhere else in the northern part of the state? There should be nothing so prosaic and useful as farm buildings anywhere within view of the Stately Mansion, however costly and fine they might be.

By half closing her eyes Jo could see every room in the house—and could furnish each in the breath-taking splendor of her own fancy. The thought that she might some day actually enter the house itself was too terrifyingly thrilling to bear. Why, it was all white and high, with a round turret standing out toward the Point where anybody on the south shore could see sunrise and sunset!

The nearest she had ever been to its door was when she waited in the buggy while her father went in to pay Mr. Hilyard the year’s rent on the Porte farm—before the Portes bought their land, that was—or to talk about the building of a new fence about the pasture, or the draining of the low land that lay just back of the hill. It was always Mr. Leonard Hilyard her father dealt with now, though Jo could remember when it was old Ashbrooke Hilyard who took care of such things. Jo never saw the old man now. It was said that he hadn’t left his room for more than three years. But she had wondered much about him and wished she might steal into the house by some secret door, find the stairway to the old man’s room, and sit before him again while he talked, as he used to talk when he visited the Portes, of the early days and the rugged years when hardy men and women came to live upon the land and accepted its hazards and defeats along with its victories.

Mr. Leonard Hilyard seldom talked of such things, it seemed, and only on rare occasions went about among the neighbors. His tenants came to him if they had anything to talk about. And yet he was a pleasant man and had a kindly way. People said he might be more like his father, old Ashbrooke, if he hadn’t married Alda Tate, whose father had been Doctor Tate of Carthia. But there was no way of telling about such things. That had happened long before Jo was born, before the Portes came north at all, and the three Hilyard children were older than Jo.

She would never forget the last time she had waited outside the Hilyard door. Especially would she never forget how her father looked when he came out upon the porch with Mr. Leonard Hilyard and stood there in the bare sun, with his high stiff collar on a little to one side, and his best suit, cigar-brown, baggy in the seat as if he had stolen something while he was in the house. He had stood wagging his hat airily and chatting with Mr. Hilyard for all the world as though they were just neighbors, and then he had spoiled it all by giving a little jerk of a bow at the moment he said good-by. What made it worse was that Mr. Hilyard, gray-haired and upstanding in flannel shirt and corduroy breeches, with high boots, had given a genial salute with his palm spread outward from his temple.

Jo had squirmed, but when her father got into the buggy and picked up the reins he cleared his throat importantly and said, “One of the world’s gentlemen—Mr. Hilyard!”

Thereupon Jo had glanced at her father furtively and had seen again how proud and fine his profile was. He was every bit as good a man as Leonard Hilyard, even if he didn’t have any money and had to rent a farm to live on.

“What room were you in, Pa?” Jo asked breathlessly.

His reply had been careless, offhand: “The study, as usual.” You might almost have thought he entered it every week instead of once or twice a year!

He had given old Duke a light touch of the whip then with a flourish as they departed down the rich gloom of the “avenue” where great elms interwove overhead. Jo had glanced back at the Lombardy poplars standing as if on guard about the house. The house and buildings were in a slight depression on the rise of land, and from this had come the name “Sky Valley.” At the stone-pillared gate her father had been obliged to draw sharply to one side, for through it came at a mad gallop two boys and a girl mounted on shining black horses. Jo had gripped the side of the buggy and craned back at them as they flashed by, for it was not often one caught a glimpse of the Hilyard children—Royce and young Ashbrooke and Dorothy. They were always away at school or at summer camps or traveling with their mother on visits to relatives in a place they called “the East.” They spent so little time at home that Jo had always pitied them, had never felt toward them any jealousy. The Stately Mansion was her own, her very own, in a way that they would not discover, probably, as long as they lived.

The tree swayed in the rising wind and Jo began to feel cramped and cold. Cloud shadows moved like wild, slate-colored islands over the lake. And now from the house her mother was calling in that voice of hers that put shame on any dreaming.

Jo frowned as she emerged into the open farmyard on the lake shore. Ned Larkin, the hired man, had said something only last week about her growing pretty. But that was just more of his tormenting. She knew better. Her eyes were still olive green, darker like smoke only around the iris, and never would be either pansy-colored or velvet brown like certain caterpillars. Her hair, which until a year or two ago had been white as bleached straw, was now the distressing shade of newly sawed logs. Her nose was flat and short and already this spring was liberally sprinkled with cinnamon. Her mouth was the only feature in which she could see any promise of beauty, although she did have to keep it tucked in to look anything like the lovely ladies on calendars or in the Sears, Roebuck catalogs. As for her arms and legs, they just went where they wanted to, no matter what graceful attitudes she practiced in front of the dresser mirror in her mother’s room. Even now it stung her to recall what Phoebe Dibney had said at school last winter: “Tall girls are admired, but little girls are loved.”

She gave a hot, angry gasp of resentment at everything and ran past the soggy manure pile beside the log stable toward the squat, whitewashed log house on the lake shore. There her indignant retrospection immediately vanished. A stormy, broken clamor rose from the dark ribbon of open water between the beach and the smoke-blue, porous mat of ice which still lay over most of Fallen Star Lake. Jo pressed her hands hard against her chest. Always the coming of the wild ducks made her feel so—as if something were escaping from within herself to that shrill, swift-winged turmoil that came from the unknown and vanished into the unknown again. Blue-hills, mallards and butterballs by the hundreds skimmed, settled, or dove, to rise once more with a muted scream of joy or ancient fear and to etch for an instant their brief black crosses against the leaden sky. She could not bear watching them for long. She turned quickly toward the house, the bedraggled Rhode Island reds scattering before her.

The cove, this house, and the steep, nobly treed hill back of it were all known to her beyond mere thinking and feeling. Their very familiarity irked her at times and drove her to climb among the branches of the tall Norway pine for a fleeting glimpse of that other world. Her father had told her that she was too young to know that other worlds can irk you too and send you back to the familiar and homely things with a deep sense of peace and comfort restored, but that telling had seemed to her very dull.

Jo had been barely a year old when she had come to this house with her mother from Grandfather Hartley’s farm in the southern part of the state. Her father had built it himself—a kitchen and one moderate room for sleeping and living in it was then—and had had it in readiness for the arrival of his family. It was as if Jo herself could remember their coming, so many times had her mother recounted the event. They had drawn up to the cabin in a surrey with tassels hanging from the roof, an equipage her father had grandly hired for a dollar, and her mother, glancing about her in a dazed way, had moaned, “Gracious me, Ernest! Is this only northern Minnesota? It looks to me like a wilderness! Where are the fields?”

Jo’s father had laughed and lifted her mother down from the surrey and carried her across the threshold of the sweet-smelling, new log house. That was thirteen years ago and in all that time her mother had only once returned to her home in the south. That had been when Grandfather Hartley had died. Jo could not recall her father ever lifting her mother across the threshold again, either. Some things, like that and funerals, had a way of happening only once, it seemed.

The cabin door opened and a dishpanful of water tossed a fleet, glistening arc over the empty flower bed beneath the kitchen window.

“Jobina! Where on earth have you been? Don’t you know it’s noon nearly? Ned’ll be in before we know it—and the table not set! Here—fetch me a pail of water before you come in. And come in by the side door. I’ve just mopped up. Hurry, now! I declare I don’t know where you keep yourself half the time.”

Jo sauntered toward the well, swinging the pail and thinking hard. Why did her mother always yell like that, as if she were a mile away? It was bad enough when you were alone, but if someone happened to walk home from school with you ... It made Jo twist inside. And yet there was something awfully sad about her mother’s voice, too, as if a bird that had once had a sweet song had got caught in her throat and was strangling there. Jo could remember when that voice had been like a lullaby, even in ordinary speech. And why should her mother be so eager to have things ready when Ned Larkin came in from the fields? He was only a “transient” who had been coming and going with the seasons ever since Jo could remember. Even when he might have got work somewhere else he would stay on for weeks at the Portes’, puttering about simply for his board and room as if he were a relative. Her mother even made macaroni and cheese once a week because it was Ned Larkin’s favorite dish, although her father detested it.

There was something the matter with her mother; something more than a singing bird caught in her throat. But how could anyone only fourteen years old find out what it was?